On Tuesday night, Stephen Colbert interviewed former George W Bush henchman Donald Rumsfeld who had agreed to visit the Late Night with Stephen Colbert studio primarily to talk about his new “Churchill Solitaire” app. After some initial soft soaping, Colbert eased into the issues that we all were waiting for and the resulting conversation did not disappoint.
“Are you ever upset that there is another Donald out there who is even more famous than you for never apologizing for anything?” he asked.
The former secretary of defense said he has never met Donald Trump and doesn’t quite understand how or why he is “touching a nerve” with so many people. Things got increasingly more tense, however, as Colbert moved on to the decision to go to war with Iraq in 2003, asking if the rise of ISIS was ever even considered by the Bush administration as a “worst-case scenario.”
Colbert then confronted his guest on his famous quote about “known knowns, known unknowns, and unknown unknowns.” In his mind, there is a fourth option that Rumsfeld leaves out: “unknown knowns, which is the thing that we know, and then we choose not to know or not let other people know we know.”
“There was an unknown known for the American people,” Colbert said. “It was known that there was not hard evidence, but we were presented a partial picture. And that’s the unknown known that we were denied. Do you think that was the right thing to do?”
As Rumsfeld filibustered, Colbert pressed him, asking, “Were there things that the administration, or you, knew that we didn’t learn about out of the best possible intentions, which is there were things that would undermine the case for a war you thought was necessary to save the United States?”
In the end, the sit-down with Rumsfeld was yet another in-depth interview that he could never have pulled off as his old Colbert Report character. It took straightforward, genuine persistence, but the real Stephen Colbert got the job done.”
The Daily Beast – Stephen Colbert Hammers Rumsfeld on Iraq and the Rise of ISIS
To watch the clip use the password: imincorrigible
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